Brendan O'Neill is editor of the online magazine spiked and is a columnist for the Big Issue in London and The Australian in, er, Australia. His satire on environmentalism, Can I Recycle My Granny and 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas, is published by Hodder & Stoughton. He doesn't
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To Owen Jones and other middle-class Leftists, horny-handed working people are an exotic tribe to be fawned over and photographed

Normally when a white, middle-class, well-educated Brit wants to rub shoulders with a noble savage, he heads off to Kenya to gawk at the Masai dutifully dancing for his chin-stroking entertainment, or he spends a couple of weeks in Palestine to watch brown people picking olives under the yoke of Israeli intimidation. Not Owen Jones. The Independent’s Left-wing columnist has found an altogether cheaper way to mix with earthy, “authentic” tribes: by hopping on a train to Durham and spending a few hours in the company of that grizzled, largely defeated caste of people known as Miners.

Mr Jones and his media friends treated Durham’s miners the same way other middle-class youngsters treat villagers they happen upon in a rural bit of Rwanda: as intriguingly and effortlessly decent, noble creatures who one must simply be photographed standing next to. They tweeted pics of themselves with these cute creatures. In his speech, Mr Jones referred to the miners as “ordinary working people” (ordinary: “regular, normal, customary” – OED) and said these poor, grafting folk are often “faceless, forgotten, ignored”. Not any more – now they’re all over Twitter and Facebook and are having their nobility celebrated in the Guardian, courtesy of their middle-class, Dickensian patrons down in London.

It’s so extraordinarily patronising. To these anthropological daytrippers, Durham is little more than a Potemkin village, existing primarily as a symbol of something or other rather than as a real place. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Mr Jones takes this borderline caring/haughty approach to working people. After all, by his own admission his entire career in radical journalism was triggered by feelings of pity for the working classes, or, as he calls them, “the vulnerable” who inhabit “conquered” communities. At the start of his book Chavs he describes being at a dinner party in a “gentrified” part of London, surrounded by “educated and open-minded professionals” like himself, and just as “the blackcurrant cheesecake was being carefully sliced” someone said something horrible about “chavs”. It was this slur against “the poor”, against “the victims of social problems”, that propelled Mr Jones into radical activism. So his starting point is pity, not solidarity, a lofty Dickens-like concern for the down-at-heel rather than any experience or understanding of working people’s resourcefulness. To Mr Jones, the miners of Durham are just more vulnerable people to be fawned over, congratulated for surviving.

Of course, Mr Jones isn’t the only young Leftist who looks upon working people as ordinary yet heroic, savage as well as noble. Who can forget when the radical anti-tax dodging collective UK Uncut invited its impeccably middle-class members to attend one of its demos “dressed as a worker” – a PC version of blacking up. Or when a Royal College of Art Student designed “Arthur Scargill chic” clothes, including a green donkey jacket and tatty bobble hats, for youths to dress up in. It seems that for the new generation of Leftists, born after the political defeat of working-class movements, workers are just odd creatures from a bygone era, whose hilarious styles we should copy and whose sad, little villages we should visit and check into on Facebook.

The thrill modern Leftists get from shoulder-rubbing with working tribes might explain why they’re so hostile to any attempt by working people to move up the social ladder, to stop being working class. Mr Jones heaps opprobrium on these folk in his book, accusing them of having been won over by Thatcherite “dog-eat-dog individualism” and failing to celebrate their “working classness” (oh, Jesus). He favourably quotes Hazel Blears: “I’ve never understood the term ‘social mobility’ because that implies you want to get out of somewhere… And I think there is a great deal to be said for making who you are something to be proud of.” In short, know your place. These Leftists want to keep working people frozen in time, suspended in cultural formaldehyde, because as long as they stay put, making ends meet in their defeated yet amazingly still noble towns, then Mr Jones and others can continue making careers from crying over their predicament and marvelling at their earthy decency.